Ryo-ta saitoh

25/05/2026

《Fish Chasing Light》

Red was not skin, not blood. It was the brightness left behind closed lids, a light with no escape.

I set the print on the desk. A naked woman was there, yet woman no longer named her. Breast, belly, shoulder had sunk into red; the body was heat remembering form.

At the shoot she lay silent on white cloth, her left fingers twisting its edge. I knew my gaze had made them move. Once she looked at me, almost speaking. I pretended not to see. In the finder, distance failed; her skin entered me. Each shutter left metal in my throat.

The headache returned: a wire behind the right eye. In darkness, white lines crossed like waterlight, near and unreachable.

Before dawn I took up the old ruling pen, made for exact contours. Exactness was now an insult, the eye’s alibi. With a tool for measuring the world, I opened what could not be measured.

The black nib shook. It missed the outline and cut the red, wounding a place neither flesh nor shadow. The line did not lie on the photograph; it rose from within. I drew more. They adorned nothing, explained nothing. They broke the image’s frail order.

I remembered a childhood market: silver fish in a tub. Whenever the bare bulb trembled on the water, one spent its last strength turning toward it. Not food, but light. That convulsion toward the unreachable was its proof of life.

I had pretended to forget that fish. I had not.

With each white line, it moved in the red, hungry for what vanished at touch. Black ink shone white. No—the red had torn, and darkness looked like light.

I drew to erase the fact of seeing. Every line deepened it. The pen would never reach her; not reaching, it wounded more deeply.

By morning, white paths crossed the red and arrived nowhere. From within it, her gaze returned.

The work was not beautiful. Perhaps truth begins where beauty fails: not harmony, but rupture; not meaning, but heat before meaning. Even that was an excuse.

In the red, the slender fish turned.

Was it the fish chasing light, or I? I had seen only a living thing spending itself toward what it could not touch.

ryo_ta saitoh

07/05/2026

repost

Sedimented Surfaces and Lines as Fissures
—On the Recent Work

This recent work connects the themes of “wound,” “noise,” and “excess” seen in the artist’s earlier works to more art-historical questions of painting.

Just as the lineage of Informel and postwar European painting gave form to the instability of human existence, the color fields in this work—where brown, green, red, blue, and yellow intermingle—can be read not as harmonious color, but as traces of peeling, abrasion, and overwriting. What emerges here is an attitude that treats painting not as a beautiful image, but as a stratum of memory and damage.

At the same time, the black horizontal and diagonal lines that traverse the picture plane do not so much open up space as tear into the sedimented surface once again, exposing it. The line functions both as a compositional device that organizes chaos and as a wound that destabilizes order. This duality is one of the work’s most significant features.

What is at stake here is not “how violently the surface can be torn,” but what kind of time, memory, and structure remain on the surface after it has been torn. In this sense, the work can be seen as an important turning point that expands the aesthetics of BARRACUDA PORTFOLIO from an expression of excess into an historically charged abstraction.

2026

26/04/2026

Critique
以下、抜粋

裂傷としての形象、軌跡としての身体―
―BARRACUDA PORTFOLIOについて

BARRACUDA PORTFOLIOは、戦後抽象が切り開いた「形態の解体」と「身体の痕跡化」という問題系を、欲望・禁忌・暴力・非知の次元において再編する実践として位置づけられる。ここで重要なのは、単に形を崩すことではなく、形象の秩序が破れる閾において、いかなる感覚的・存在論的強度が立ち現れるかである。ステイトメントに見られる「禁忌」「過剰」「非知」という語彙は、バタイユ的な侵犯と思考の限界を想起させる。作品は完成されたイメージではなく、意味が不安定なまま噴出する出来事として構想されている。

赤を主調とする作品では、画面は血、肉、熱、損傷を喚起する物質的表面として現れ、そこを走る鋭い線は輪郭ではなく裂傷として機能する。この点でフォンタナの切断や、フォートリエ、デュビュッフェらの戦後的マチエールを想起させるが、本作家の関心は平面の批判そのものより、身体の内部性と境界の不安定さに向かっている。他方、モノクロームの線描作品では、衝動や騒音が線の反復と錯綜へ転化し、身体は統一的な像としてではなく、速度、躊躇、痙攣の痕跡として示される。そこにはポロックやトゥオンブリーを思わせる契機があるが、自由な主体の表出というより、主体そのものの揺らぎが主題化されている。

この作家の実践は、日本の戦後前衛、とりわけ具体における身体と行為の問題とも響き合う。しかし、その重心は行為の解放や祝祭性にはなく、むしろ傷つきやすい身体、欲望と暴力の交錯、自己同一性の崩れに置かれている。したがってBARRACUDA PORTFOLIOは、戦後抽象の英雄的身振りを反復するのではなく、その後に残された裂傷の場を現代的に再起動する試みといえる。絵画はここで、秩序ある形象を提示する媒体ではなく、意味がなお定着せず、自己と世界の境界が揺らぐ地点を保持する装置となっている。ゆえに本作家の仕事は、抽象の形式を通じて、身体と存在の限界経験を現在形で問い直す実践として評価できる。

2025 批評論文より

26/04/2026

art project
-BARRACUDA PORTFOLIO-

BARRACUDA PORTFOLIOは、形象の秩序を、欲望や恐れ、官能や暴力によって裂き、その亀裂に噴き上がる過剰へと身を投じる実践です。ここでの創造は、禁忌に触れることを通じて、存在の深部にひそむ非知をあらわにする行為となります。騒音は線へと溶け、その軌跡として意味が立ち現れます。身体はもはや閉じた同一性を保たず、視線は触覚へと変質します。表現は単なる伝達の手段を超えて、自己の輪郭を失いながら、他者と世界へと開かれていきます。BARRACUDA PORTFOLIOは、調和としての美ではなく、傷、恍惚、破れのうちにのみ立ち現れる強度を探る試みです。

BARRACUDA PORTFOLIO is a practice that rends the order of form through desire and fear, sensuality and violence, and commits itself to the excess that surges forth from that rupture. Here, creation becomes an act that, by touching the forbidden, brings to light the unknowing that lies hidden in the depths of being. Noise dissolves into line, and meaning emerges as its trace. The body no longer preserves a closed identity, and vision is transformed into touch. Expression exceeds the mere function of communication; losing the contour of the self, it opens onto others and the world. BARRACUDA PORTFOLIO is an attempt to seek not beauty as harmony, but the intensity that appears only within wound, ecstasy, and rupture.

ryo_ta saitoh

11/03/2026

This artist’s abstraction mobilizes line not as self-expression but as a means of postponing the instant an image becomes fixed. While it may recall gestural abstraction, the all-over, or process art, line and negative space are organized here as a perceptual device, sustaining a tension that refuses to settle into consolation. In Phase 1 (Fig. 1), density generates a gravitational pull and a sense of mass without contour; the perimeter remains unsealed, fraying and thinning, while dark passages oscillate between object and event, making visibility itself provisional. Phase 2 (Fig. 2) deliberately removes the center: cell-like units disperse and nodes resist consolidation. At close range, articulation asserts itself; at a distance, the units knit into a membrane—so the image switches state with viewing distance and a field is produced. In Phase 3 (Fig. 3), line shifts into time: loops and returns choreograph the eye’s circulation, and ink pools punctuate locally rather than anchor a center. Nodes function as relays, redirecting the gaze at the moment it begins to fix. Across the three phases, mass, saturation, and vortex operate not as motifs but as mechanisms for deferring pictorial determination—an ethic of non-closure rendered as technique.

Quoted from the captions for the 2025 exhibition

29/06/2025

03/04/2025

《 releaser -個人的な体験- 》
unique piece
2024

frottage
of
PhenomenalConsciousness